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Recently, there has been a circle-jerk of clickbait, gleefully consumed and hyperlinked by the anti-FOSS crowd. The claim is that a certain (unspecified) number of city employees are whining that Linux isn't Windows and FOSS apps aren't good enough and that Munich city fathers have decided to go back to Windows. It's all wishful nonsense from Microsoft fans.
Nick Heath at TechRepublic spoke to city council spokesman Stefan Hauf.
He said the council's recently elected mayor Dieter Reiter has instead simply commissioned a report into the future IT system for the council.
"The new mayor has asked the administration to gather the facts so we can decide and make a proposal for the city council how to proceed in future," he said.
"Not only for LiMux but for all of IT. It's about the organisation, the costs, performance and the useability and satisfaction of the users." [...] "Nothing is decided because first we have to see the report and then we can decide," he said, adding the review has not been triggered by any dissatisfaction with LiMux but is rather part of a review of how to proceed now the LiMux migration project is complete.
In the Spring of 2013, Munich noted that over 94 percent of its computers were running Linux and that the city had already saved more than €10 million over what they would have paid for EULA-ware--even with the fire sale prices initially offered by Ballmer personally.
That anyone thinks the mayor would survive re-election after blowing tens of millions on MSFT licenses and tens of millions more for more-powerful hardware to run it defies all logic.
...and, as Nick notes there, it was never about money; the move to Linux was always about freedom.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @05:25PM
The move *to* Linux (time: years ago) was about freedom, the move *from* Linux (time: now) would be about money - more specifically money would be one thing that impedes it.
That's what the summary meant. I'm not sure it's really what happened, I think I remember a lot of talks about money savings back then...
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:35PM
I think I remember a lot of talks about money savings back then
I doubt you remember "back then".
My €10 million link (highlighted version) [googleusercontent.com] mentions the years-later bought-and-paid-for-by-M$ "study" by Hewlett-Packard--which anyone who wasn't biased to begin with would recognize as FUD.
(Scroll down to the red or find "the controversial study compiled by HP" in the original.)
Note also the it is now a standard requirement that applications must be independent of operating systems portion which is *part* of the "freedom" issue.
The other part is that Munich wants to possess the source code for all the software they run.
Moving away from FOSS would screw that pooch.
.
...or you swallowed the hype.
Munich acknowledged that if they had accepted the fire-sale prices offered by Ballmer (who interrupted his skiing vacation to rush to Munich), their software prices on that day would have been lower.
The thing is that they were running 21 versions of Windoze throughout their ecosystem including NT.
They would have had to buy a whole bunch of hardware to "upgrade" their M$ software.
They also would have needed ANOTHER "upgrade" shortly after that because of proximate EoL issues.
With LiMux (their own spin of Debian/Ubuntu), they kept all their hardware in service and all their upgrades eternally carry $0 software costs.
...well, at least 94 percent are gratis at present.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:44PM
hopefully, they will make improvements and put the source back into the community!!!
There has been much trolling about functionality being missing from key apps. But ultimately if a local government can get it working for the purposes of the local people, we all should benefit...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @07:50PM
In the process of getting off of M$Orifice, Munich's IT guys had to convert the forms, templates, macros, etc. used by EVERY CITY EMPLOYEE[1] to something usable by OpenOffice|LibreOffice.
They made a tool to help with that [gooogle.com] which *is* available to all.
The easy way to avoid "compatibility" issues is to never use proprietary formats|protocols to begin with.
Barring that, mandate use of open standards throughout your own ecosystem.
The UK gov't just did that with document formats; more and more countries are seeing the wisdom in that.
.
...and I forgot to add one of my favorite links regarding this matter [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [europa.eu] which includes:
When the Munich mayor was at a conference in California, giving a speech about LiMux, Bill Gates was there as well. Ude, who is well-known as a humorist, loves to tell what happened next. Gates asked Ude if he would accept a lift to the airport in Gates's limousine. Wanting to save time, Ude agreed and off they went.
Once in the car, however, the mayor discovered that the Microsoft CEO wanted to use the 20-minute ride to talk him out of LiMux.
Gates asked: "Mr. Ude, why are you doing this?".
Ude replied: "To gain freedom."
Gates: "Freedom from what?"
Ude: "Freedom from you, Mr. Gates."
According to Ude, the rest of the ride passed in silence [linux-magazin.de].
.
Re: My comment formatting:
I surf without scripts, stylesheets, and images and my fixed-width font is Monofonto.
I see only single-column full-width readable text in my window, so what I see is likely different from what most folks see.
I enabled stylesheets momentarily to see what the recent {quote} implementation looked like and, unimpressed, immediately disabled those again.
My browser also wraps lines containing monospaced fonts no differently than proportional text.
[1] That individualized hand-holding was one of the big reasons the conversion took so bloody long.
Only Able to Use Windows? You're Fired [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 24 2014, @02:58AM
The deputy mayor is a M$ FUDster. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [softpedia.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:46PM
I currently have mod points, and I'm tempted to use them for an "Insightful" mod - but damn that could use some formatting! I had to copy the text and paste it into a text editor just to be able to read it.
Posting anonymously so I can mod this thread... mrider
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25 2014, @10:11PM
I suppose you may 'buy' software and do not have any info on source code. That is possibly ok for some uses but if you rely on something being there for years also after a company producing it closed down then you need to have source code. It may be that this source code is just a pile of garbage that nobody sane would want to touch anymore but it at least gives you a chance at fixing it after original author left the stage.